Every country has the government it deserves.

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

Let him who desires peace prepare for war.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.